Ch ch ch ch changes

Wowzers, it’s been a long time since I wrote an actual blogy blog post. Things have changed a lot for me over the past 6 months and it’s taken some settling in. Consequently, my website and blog have been completely neglected.

Changes 🙂 Changes are exciting.

On a personal family note, my 5 year old has started school which took the difficulty level up a notch. I now have a teenager at high school, a year sixer, a kindy kid and my littlest munchikin home with me full time.

Next, I decided to go back to school. Quite suddenly last November, I decided I wanted to go back to uni and do some post grad education. I took on 2 units this semester and had no idea how I’d manage it, surprisingly, I’ve managed it well, having achieved distinctions for every assignment I’ve handed in so far. I’m proud of myself 🙂

I’ve also ramped up my face to face consulting time after taking a few years out of clinical practice after the birth of my now 3 year old. I’m loving that too.

And finally, I’m completing a certificate 4 in training and assessing and am working as a volunteer supervised trainer for the Australian Breastfeeding Association, training breastfeeding counsellors. The course is batshit boring but the experience is great. As soon as I finish the course, I’ll keep the volunteer work but will also start applying for teaching jobs and hope to get a job as a lecturer in herbal medicine.

With all of the above, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for my website and I’ve had to have a really good think (about a six month think) about what to do. In the end, I decided that I don’t want to let this site go and I do want to start putting a bit of time into it again now that I’ve settled into the new challenges. I’ll be simplifying things, updating things a bit and fine tuning it all. The plan is to shut down the shop, which is a great big time sink when done properly (I haven’t been doing it properly for some time). I’ll be selling off remaining stock at bargain basement prices via my facebook page and my local buy, swap, sell page. I’m planning to fill this blog with stories from other mamas. I want real life stories from real mums. Birth stories, breastfeeding stories, parenting stories. This will remain a site specifically dedicated to providing information for embracing motherhood naturally from conception through to baby’s first year. Since my family is well beyond that now, I’m going to fill the blog with the stories of others and I’ll be adding to the information pages as my schedule allows. The big change that you’ll notice is that I’ll be experimenting with putting some google adwords ads on the site. I plan to be very vigilant about the type of ads that I allow on the site and if I feel that the ads are compromising on the quality of the site, my values as a parent or health practitioner, they’ll go. I just want to make sure the site can earn it’s maintenance fees is all. Please let me know if you notice any formula ads or anything of that nature.

These changes are my mission for the next week or so. Before semester 2 starts 🙂